The majority of the cameras that I see on a daily basis are for petty theft. So much so that it’s a given in my head that a retail environment will be under video surveillance
You are choosing to work for a company. If the company wants to record you while you do your job that can very well be part of the contract you accept when starting to work.
Most of the offices I've worked at had surveillance, the supermarket I buy food from has surveillance, the shopping malls I visit have surveillance. Nobody is forcing you to go there and feel free to start your competing series of offices / supermarkets / shopping malls without surveillance; check if the market care instead of assuming this is what people want, before legislating and imposing regulations and fines.
The man on the other end of the gun certainly has a choice, and a negotiating position—they just aren’t very good ones, through no fault of his own.
I personally would prefer to live in a society where those with power don’t have moral carte blanche to treat those without power as badly as they like, as long as the unfortunates are technically given choices and/or some articulable market forces can reasonably be said to have been causal contributors to the current configuration of their reality. But I guess a lot of people, particularly people used to having power, may not agree with my preference.
>Also bag-searches seem more invasive than video.
Then don't do either. Or only do some random searches or when you're suspecting someone of having stolen something. Treating employees like thieves by default is nuts. We don't accept petty theft as a justification for mass surveillance outside the workplace so we shouldn't accept it inside the workplace either.